david@ukma.UUCP (David Herron, NPR Lover) (02/11/85)
I came up with the following piece of C code the other night. A friend and
I were talking about ways of writing a generic Forth interpretor in C.
We realized that the register save/restore at procedure call cost a lot
when you have lots of small routines (as in a forth interpretor). Also,
a large switch statement has expenses of its own. Then we thought about
indirect goto's. et voila:
main()
{
int *a;
b:
a = b;
printf("a = 0x%x\n", a);
}
(NOTE: This was compiled under 4.2BSD on a -750)
This compiles and runs perfectly. However, when adding an obvious statement
(namely, "goto *a") it won't let us compile it. It seems like the compiler
will *almost* let us do this.
What I want to know is, "can this be easily added to the language?",
"Is it a reasonable thing to add?". Comments anyone?
--
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David Herron;
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